Luminous ExpansionRenzo Piano’s renovation of the Harvard Art Museums bringsintellectual as well as architectural openness to an evolving campuswritten by william s. saunders

From the start of the 19th century until after World War II, Harvard University buildings in Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts, were, by and large, architecturally and rhetorically heavy — imposing, massive piles of stone and brick conveying gravity, oratorical loftiness, and, if not righteousness, then at least a certainty meant to
make people look up to authority. (Try mounting the steps of Widener
Library without feeling small.) This weightiness defined the intellectual life Harvard wanted to sponsor: grave, sure, grounded in tradition.

The Fogg Museum’s Georgian Revival 1927 structure was of itstime in realizing its era’s wish to be traditional, to embrace the valuesand images of an earlier day. At its core was a courtyard wrapped by afacade copying a 15th-century church in Montepulciano, Italy. Rep-resentations of the past were meant to legitimize the present.

But increasingly since World War II, intellectual life in universities has embraced uncertainty, has become more tentative, antidogmatic, untraditional, and certainly antiauthoritarian. Worlds apart
from Widener’s heaviness, postwar International architecture, dom-

ARCHITECT

RENZO PIANO BUILDING WORKSHOPthe third-floor arcade at the Harvard Art Museums overlooks the restoredCalderwood Courtyard, which is topped by a new three-story glass atrium witha glass roof. The dozens of light fixtures that hang from a delicate filigree oflong wires add to the sense of elegant lightness. N I